Mongol History Teacher Reacts | Everyone was WRONG about Genghis Khan | SciShow

hey there I'm Mr Terry I'm a high school history teacher welcome back to another history teacher reacts video all right this video has been blowing up and it crushed me so this is by a channel I have not seen before called sa show and the video is titled everyone was wrong about gangas KH now the school that I teach at in the history Department I'm known as the Mongol teacher cuz I'm interested in them way more than the other teachers and I argue their importance to them all the time now selfishly I'm a little bit upset at potentially at this video because I don't want something that I have been preaching about jenas Khan to be false so I'm going to go hardcore copium mode here as we check this out wait this is Hank Green okay if he's going to be dogging on Jenis Khan he's got to have beef with Jon Jon and crash course world history big influence on me as a teacher obviously gets me and the students going because of the whole running meme you know what I'm talking about with them being the exception in fact I would be wearing my were the exception uh crash course shirt but I lost at my last move so I want to know if they have beef but all right time to turn on the copium I'm going to be huffing it here what have they been lying about my boy Jenis by all accounts genas Khan got around not just around Eurasia which he conquered and ruled for decades he got around come on come on like around we don't know for sure how many children he had but historians suggest it was a lot so many in fact that some studies and pretty much all of the internet have claimed that a huge number of in Central and East Asia today are his direct descendants 1 in 200 in the world one and eight within the former Mongol Empire yeah that's insane is he going to crash that bubble I'm a little bit okay copium mode I got to turn it up but before you go around telling everybody you know who your great great great great add like 25 more great great grandfather let's do a deeper dive into how this idea came about and How likely it really is see the nerd science nerds are ruin in a gentic change within a population typically happens a few ways natural selection and random change both juggle the frequency of Gene variance and How likely they are to show up in a given individual certain genes could also turn up more frequently thanks to a prolific breeder passing on their DNA at a high rate much like genghiskhan was suspected to be doing so if we want to know how many of his descendants are running around today we have to trace the source of genetic changes the Y chromosome would be a great place to start with this because it's passed on by a single parent and does not swap its DNA with its paired X chromosome that makes it an exception compared to autosomes or he said the word exception Q it nonsex chromosomes which like to trade bits of genetic material with their matching counterparts just to keep when those genes are passed on to offspring so unlike others the Y chromosome stays intact over many generations making it relatively easy to use to trace its ancestral origin a 2003 paper looked at the DNA variation chos of thousands of individuals from Central Asia to the Pacific and their results show that about 8% of their participants have the same Y chromosome hype this means they belong to the same broad group their Y chromosomes might not be totally identical but they all come from the same ancestor okay is this where he's going to say that that common ancestor was not the mongal largest contiguous Empire in history you better have something to back this up here 8% is a lot especially across such a large area it's something the researchers would be more likely to see if they were working with a small isolated population but instead it was like most of Asia and their findings suggested a single lineage was responsible for those 8% of people from there the team used models to consider population Dynamics and genetic mutation and long story short they traced this hype to a probable common ancestor about a thousand years ago likely in Mongolia case closed we did it Spirit of changus is in us well 8% of us well that are from there and then they ask themselves who's a person who lived around then who was incredibly reproductively successful and they came up with genghiskhan after all reigning from Eastern Europe to the Sea of Japan is bound to have some lasting influence on civilization not just culturally but also genetically he is known to have had many wives and many many concubines over the years which some Scholars say may have numbered in the hundreds that said we don't know how many children he actually had as only four of his sons with his first wife the the European style of the writings or the the drawings of Asians always makes them look like Europeans like look at that look at that thing that doesn't look anything like the Mongols if you actually look at them I mean okay this is also pre uh you could tell this pre- Renaissance as well because there is very very little in terms of perspective look up big the bed is compared to the tent yeah they did have Yurts and moved around like that but come on also what they're just holding the arrow do they know anything about Mongol culture as his heirs and the thing is we don't have any way of knowing if this Y chromosome haa group is actually connected to genghiskhan because we don't have access to his DNA since his remains were buried in secret and have never been found yeah the story is they did it was one of those things you probably heard this a few rulers have done this in history like the uh founder of China Shong Shamong D had the had his uh he was buried okay somewhere and then there's a couple rumors there's a couple rumors that have come out of this one is that they ordered that everyone that was there that was part of like and would have known where he was buried so like Engineers whatever people that worked there had them killed so they couldn't tell where it was and then also like had those people have them killed to get it like two tiers away from the original part of it and then also there's a rumor that they may have like diverted a river to cover over it so they uh messed with the geography to hide it even further but yeah we don't know where he is basically the researchers were guessing it was a decent guess and credit where it's due it got their work plenty of attention but still a guess still their resarch been continually referenced over the years as proof of the great K's genetic Legacy and the likelihood that you may be related to there's not much in the way of engineering left from the Mongols cuz they are no mtic but the stuff that people have made is just awesome look at that that's so cool but a study challenged this link to genas Khan they set out to take a closer look at the Y chromosome group described in the earlier study and compare it to closely related y group lineages they also ramped up the sample size to over 18,000 from 292 populations collecting new samples from thousands of individuals on top of using previously published Y chromosome sequences their results told a different story they determined this hype was older than previously thought originating nearly 2600 years ago long before genghiskhan was around they also showed that people most likely to be the true descendants of genas Khan belong to a different haplotype they did this not just using DNA evidence but historical records that describe where genghiskhan sent his troops including his kids but also people he was not related to and the 8% Hao group corresponded with the not related folks They concluded that the Big Y Hao group instead represents the ancestral expansion of the mongolic speaking peoples so just ancestors of the Mongols so they're like cousins of him rather than in relation to him I mean that's basically how genetics work but it all came through that same tree now those people there there's a huge family tree that goes before uh genas Khan the whole like turkic in a way family family tree is massive it goes all the way across EUR Asia um it's huge and basically all those nomadic peoples that have lived for thousands of years All In Central Northern Asia um and then expand out and then they create their own Empires I mean that's like how history has been if you anything about your Asian history so okay so he himself would have also been a part of that line I mean it's true it's not like he would have created that that chromosone right so as one of the founder ofes in Mongol peoples its success is do more to overall expansion of Mongol populations than one guy having a lot of kids but also while the Y chromosome can help us determine direct lineage it does have its drawbacks why chromosome studies only Trace ancestry via a single parent lineage leaving out the other genetic half completely so it can paint an incomplete picture of relatedness that said when we're not focused solely on sex chromosomes our genetic material can be harder to track because chromosomes recombine all over the place but there is a workaround we can also Trace ancestry by looking at identical by descent or IBD regions IBD regions are any single piece of DNA that is passed down from a common ancestor without being fully genetically reshuffled these IBD fragments get smaller and more mixed up over Generations as they get split up and combined back together in Offspring in the end we are all made up of a patchwork of ibds and they can tell a tale of common distant ancestors as we look for shared patterns at 20 seems like it's still it's going to come down to this idea that it's more complex than we thought and it's always easy to say that 20 study rather ambitiously attempted to trace the interrelatedness of all humankind using this technique good on you take on the big tasks they compared about is this similar by the way to the Human Genome Project that was also around that same time was this was the the findings that they found around jingus Khan um part of that I'm trying to remember that original group because it was around that turn of the Millennium right 15 million IBD fragments tracing common ancestors across 200,000 years and with a found were nine distinct human genetics regions East and West Africa northern Europe the Arctic East Asia Oceania South Asia the Middle East and South America and these populations shared way more IBD bits with each other than with neighbors from other regions they also found that the center of Eurasia is the most genetically mixed geographic region in the world and this makes a it's because it's nomatic it's nomatic people didn't the the geography there is not really well suitable for a lot of uh persistent Agriculture and and and building like in Mongol in Mongolia the vegetation is great for there's not the Great Rivers climate wise not great that's why historically those groups that do survive there often and usually eventually migrate south into the gray river valleys that are around EUR Asia so it makes sense there because they're they're they're always nomadic sense for thousands of years this central region was a hot spot for extensive trading and migration as well as Conquest between otherwise regions so even thoughe flow is relatively limited by geography we still interbreed wherever we cross paths and our genes move around okay back to genghiskhan these researchers did specifically look for genetic evidence of the Mongol Empire through this middle Eurasia region as well as other areas they occupied at length they compared the DNA of tatars who they describe as the likely descendants of Mongols to people living in the Middle East Russia and Europe and despite these regions having been bordered in fact they they you'll when you read Marco Polo's book he refers to them as the tatars and that that region kind of like Western Asia tatars directly occupied by the Mongols at some point or another modern tatars were more closely related to European populations than those in East Asia Now using modern tatars as their Mongol DNA s there was imperialism also especially that came from Russia down into those regions like uh in like Crimea for example which has the indigenous peoples of that are like tatars and so yeah there was a lot of imperialism from Eastern Europe coming that way gets complicated because even though the term Tatar has historically been linked directly with the Mongol Empire this may not be an accurate account of complex history and ancest but what the study did find present day Central Asia was comparatively very tightly related to East Asian populations given the trading along the silk route had connected Eastern Asia with the West since the second century it makes sense that g well okay so look so I was telling you about Tatar populations if you see I don't if you can see my cursor very well but if you know where Crimea is you can see that there's these trade routes these Caravan routes that that mix there across the Black Sea the land routes and then the one coming from the Mediterranean into the Black Sea you see there's like a city there it says pacum anyway so you can see all of the um the mixture there of peoples in fact Southern Crimea again you're talking about tatars later too was a also a Colony so multiple groups have come and gone there for those trade purposes so it makes sense that an area like that would have a lot of genetic diversity Angus Khan's Empire wasn't Lally I mean it's literally where Europe and Asia me main genetic influence between these regions they were pretty connected already that said for a Time the Mongol Empire controlled 16% of the total land mass of Earth so their expansion did play a major role in Expediting trade exchanges between these regions so they certainly still get credit where credit is is due what the study was able to show is that many groups of humans share IBD regions with many other groups of humans no matter where they're from that means even if your ancestors have largely stayed put generation after generation there's still a great chance that you share at least some IBD fragments with folks from distant corners of the globe of course I mean we didn't Sprout out of the ground dispersed across the planet right we have common Origins I think everyone understands that right dude look at thisy guys drip this see this is how you do nomadic lifestyle we're a sick purple uh jacket here you got varied functional boots a sweet like yellow belt and then that like almost Fedora kind of hat dude that's the life it is especially likely that you share DNA with someone living in Central Asia since they're the most likely to be carrying jeans from you know basically everywhere whether that's South America or the Arctic Circle we are all related and we are all especially related to Central Asia in the end none of these techniques can tell you if you are directly descended from genghiskhan given that we don't even have his DNA but they can so okay tell you a lot about the wide range of populations you share ancestry with no matter where in the world you are from and at the end of the day I guess there is still a chance that your DNA does in fact Harbor some deep tie to G gasan but that's not simply because he had a lot of kids it's because his Empire existed in a time and in a place where people traveled to and fro for centuries all that is to say humans are humans there's nothing that can truly wall us off into separate distinct groups because we have such a rich genetic history wo together across the globe over hundreds of thousands of years yes my brother final thoughts okay good I can turn down the copium levels a little bit because basically just what he it sounds like he said is that uh not that not ancestry that comes out of there I mean it's going to become from there's a lot of Mongols there were a lot of Mongols right and a lot of them uh practice the same type of progyny that genas Khan did it was part of the culture there but um what it did say though is that we still have a common an history through that region so through like the Mongol Empire because our Empire is going to spread and also the Mongols did a lot of inter uh marriage and allot of inter breeding themselves I mean in fact even in their western part of their empire basically what was Persia they Blended so thoroughly that they just pretty much just blended into Oblivion almost um when they they even converted to Islam and again inter Mar and all that little bit of a different story in eastern Asia there's a little bit more separation between the uh the the ruling Mongol Elite and and that's during the Yuan Dynasty when the Mongols ruled China for about a 100 years or so but nevertheless nevertheless they were an Empire that was built upon exchanging of culture and ideas and technologies that is why that's often called the Mongols bring in the first Global age minus the Americas but you know what I mean a first real Eurasian age and built that because they conquered so much and then connected so much so okay maybe you're not going through the jenus Khan specifically but it sounds like we still got all that Mongol in us all right thanks for watching today we'll see youall next time bye [Music] oh [Music]